The invention relates to improvements in apparatus for manipulating rod-shaped articles which move axially in the form of a file of aligned articles. Typical examples of such articles are plain cigarettes or filter rod sections which are obtained as a result of repeated severing of a continuous cigarette rod or filter rod and are to be transported to storage, to a packing machine or to a filter tipping machine.
Commonly owned published German patent application No. 1 757 144 discloses a guide which extends between the cutoff of a cigarette rod making machine and a filter tipping machine and defines an elongated path for a file of discrete plain cigarettes which are to be assembled with filter mouthpieces to form filter cigarettes of unit length or multiple unit length. A drawback of heretofore known guides for files of aligned axially moving rod-shaped articles, such as plain cigarettes, is that the articles tend to rise and thus leave the prescribed path when their speed reaches a certain value. Such rising of articles is highly undesirable because it can result in pileups and lengthy interruptions of delivery of articles to the next processing station. Any, even shortest, interruptions of delivery of articles in a modern filter tipping or an analogous high-speed machine can result in huge losses in output because a modern filter tipping machine (such as that known as MAX which is produced by the assignee of the present application) can turn out many thousands of filter cigarettes per minute.